Vehicle tampering and theft of vehicles and/or property within vehicles is an ongoing problem for vehicle owners. Although many technology solutions have been proposed for monitoring vehicles to detect tampering or theft, none of the prior solutions provide for automatically arming a vehicle monitoring system based on simply parking the vehicle and the vehicle owner walking away, with no need for further action. In particular, no prior solution has compared the GPS coordinates of the vehicle to the GPS coordinates of the vehicle owner's smartphone to determine that the vehicle monitoring system is to be armed.
What is needed, therefore, is a vehicle monitoring system in which a vehicle tracking device is paired with the vehicle owner's smartphone, and in which the vehicle monitoring system is automatically armed to begin monitoring and providing tamper/theft alerts when the vehicle owner walks away from the vehicle with his or her smartphone.